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If you went to ESPN.com on Thursday evening, you wouldn’t even know
that Oscar Pistorius exists. In the hours after the race, there were no
items about Pistorius on the site’s front page. (Among the top
headlines: “Jets' owner: Circus label is driven by media,” “Holmes:
Tebow deal initially floored Sanchez,” and “3rd-grader sent home for
banned Peyton jersey.”) This wasn’t an atypical omission: There was no
indication on the front of ESPN.com that the Paralympics were happening
at all. To find the results of the 100-meter dash, you had to mouse over
the “More Sports” flyout menu, then click on “Olympic Sports.” At the
top of that page is a headline—“Pistorius surrenders another Paralympic title”—that leads to a 100-word wire story. The Blade Runner, it turns out, came in fourth.

ESPN’s decision to ignore the Paralympics is perhaps less shameful than TV rights holder NBC’s move not to broadcast any of the games live.
But ESPN’s lack of coverage is still indefensible. There is no
full-time ESPN staffer—online, radio, or television—in London to cover the world’s second-largest sporting event
(4,200 athletes, 165 countries). The Worldwide Leader essentially
defines what is and isn't sports news in this country, and the company’s
call to disregard the Paralympics has relegated the event to
eighth-tier status.

Rob King, the editor-in-chief of ESPN Digital Media, says he believes that ESPN is “honoring the event.” He notes that there are nightly highlights on ESPN3 and Paralympics images in online photo galleries. David Wetherill’s amazing table tennis shot also made the top spot in the SportsCenter
Top 10. When it comes to parceling out coverage, King says you have to
consider what the Paralympics are going up against: the start of college
football and the NFL, the U.S. Open, the baseball pennant races, and
NASCAR’s Chase for the Sprint Cup. “We’re making decisions all the time
about things we deliver that can be excellent rather than just check the
box,” he says. “We had to look at when the Paralympics were happening
and where we can deploy folks.”

Even if it’s unrealistic to expect ESPN to be the all-knowing and
all-seeing Sports Panopticon, it’s fair to demand more than what we’ve
gotten from the media giant. The Washington Post had a great feature on a swimmer named Bradley Snyder who won gold in the 100-meter freestyle after losing his eyesight in a bomb blast in Afghanistan. The Guardian has a compelling interactive on the physics of running on blades. And most news outlets in the United States and abroad have run something on “boosting,” the terrifying practice in which athletes with spinal injuries harm themselves—that
can include intentionally crushing their own testicles—in order to
boost their heart rates and enhance performance. By comparison, ESPN has
had no features on the triumphs of unknown Paralympians, no
interactives, and nothing on boosting.

ESPN shouldn’t feel compelled to cover the Paralympics out of a sense
of responsibility or do-gooderism. It’s also understandable that
there’d be less coverage of the Paralympics than the Olympics—we’ve made
the same editorial decision here at Slate.
And the network surely faces coverage challenges on account of its
limited access to video highlights, which have been parceled out
primarily to NBC.

But outright neglect is not a legitimate journalistic strategy. Given
the scope and importance of the event, the athletes’ remarkable
stories, and the fascinating cultural and technological angles, ESPN
surely could have spared a single blogger to cover the Paralympics. It
could have asked Wayne Drehs,
who wrote a bunch of great features during the Olympics, to stick
around London, or perhaps sent Wright Thompson or some other longform
wizard to do a couple of long takeouts on Paralympians. And at the very
least, someone could have taken the five minutes to create a Paralympics
topic page and a standing link on the site’s front page.

In the meantime, the Paralympics blackout has continued this morning, with no content from the games on the home page. Even on that hard-to-find Olympic Sports page,
the Paralympics have been completely buried. The splash image at the
top of the screen advertises a piece on Allyson Felix’s “four tips for a
successful fitness regimen.” A wire story on Pistorius’ 200-meter contretemps
is in the fourth position in that top promotional box. After this
Sunday, the last day of the Paralympics, that story will likely
disappear entirely. ESPN.com readers won’t miss it. Why would they,
considering they never knew it was there in the first place.

About Me

I am full-time Mass Communication faculty at Towson University in Maryland and adjunct faculty in the City University of New York (CUNY) Master's in Disability Studies program.
I research media and disability issues and wrote a 2010 book on the subject: Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media, published by Advocado Press.
The media have real power to define what the public knows about disability and that's what I research.